DVD+RW Erase?

[bankshot]

I'm trying Retrospect Pro 6.0 on an external HP 200e DVD+RW drive, attached via firewire to a PC running XP. Retrospect status says the media is: "Erased." I started a backup to this device. The first thing Retrospect did was insist on erasing the media, even though the status was "Erased." This is new, never-used media, so it had nothing on it. "Erasing disc..." took about 25 minutes with the DVD drive whirring away the whole time, before finally starting to copy files to the media. Is this nornal? If so, why?? Why does Retrospect need to erase brand new media with nothing on it?

 

 

[AmyJ]

In reply to:

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Why does Retrospect need to erase brand new media with nothing on it?

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The erase method may not match the formatting required by Retrospect.

[parent55]

I have made the same discovery about the 25 minute delay writing blank media using the HP DVD200i. I agree there is a tremendous waste of time erasing blank media. I also note that Retrospect is using the HP DLA packet driver, so the format of the disk is not controlled by Retrospect. Now I will quote the December PCWorld article "DVD Burners Hit Prime Time" which says:

 

 

 

"the much faster times of the DVD+RW drives compared to the DVD-RW units are also partly due to a function built into DVD+RW drives that lets them format rewritable discs in the background. This allows you to start writing data to a DVD+RW disc much quicker-- generally within a minute of inserting the blank, unformated disc."

 

 

 

Based on this information, I believe that the problem here is in the Retrospect software which is probably treating the +RW drives like the -RW drives which do not have this fast write capability.

 

 

 

Rich